Collective Action Tent/Forum

Research and Sense-Making
21

In some other thread, I tried to put this “post modernism is evil” canard to bed by asking Gemini to draft a college curriculum to essentially train students to both understand and agree with everything @GeoffDann says. Here is is:

Notice that in Year 2, precisely to understand the dangers of relativism, students have to understand the leading arguments in favor of relativism. Also notice this whole question of the philosophical linguistic turn was occasioned by the work of Kurt Gödel and Claude Shannon, who are hardly left-bank literary continental types. (We could toss in Church-Turing for good measure). Thinkers like Russel, Whitehead, and Hilbert had every opportunity to draft a clear, complete, and consistent logical formalism for all reality. Didn’t work. Wittgenstein tried it too, gave up on it, and took his own linguistic turn.

My point is postmodernism did not come out of nowhere. For cultural analysis, semiotics is not a luxury item. It’s really the heart of the matter. Granted, mainstream postmodern semiotics has its limits (as Habermas pointed out at the time.) @dvdjsph has a new and improved version which I hope he will soon be willing to share! But seriously, understanding that intersubjective linguistic symbols can be quite equivocal hardly makes one a squishy relativist. Serious computer science, among other things, is based on that well-established, rigorously demonstrated framework.

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23

Of course Postmodernism did not come from nowhere. It is very important to understand its origins. And I am not saying it is evil. I’m saying it is both wrong, and that it is a central component of the old paradigm that 2R is supposed to be seeking a replacement for. This is made very clear by Jason Storm in the book you quoted as definitive of Metamodernism.

That previous attempts to provide a coherent model of reality (including metaphysics) failed is irrelevant, not least because every single one of the previous attempts you mentioned happened before the deep metaphysical questions raised by QM had been fully understood. Without that information, a successful model of reality was impossible, for lack of information. And as explained in other threads, the full conditions to make this shift possible include the systematic breakdown of physicalist cosmology, which has only happened in the last 5-10 years.

My point is very simple: you cannot have a paradigm shift unless you have got a clear idea what the old paradigm is and what is wrong with it, and are able to recognise and agree about the new paradigm when it becomes available. The commitment to postmodern relativism within 2R makes both of these things impossible, because it causes you, as a group, to mistake a primary cause of the problem as a necessary part of the solution. In Rufus’s questionaire about these things, one of the questions was about to what extent we need to move from seeking a singular truth to having more perspectives on it. There wasn’t even a question about whether we should be moving in the other direction. In effect, that question boiled down to “Are we postmodern enough, or do we need to triple down on our relativist attempts at collective sense-making?”

You cannot build momentum if you are incapable of moving. 2R is incapable of moving, and the cause of that problem is postmodernism. Postmodernism can’t go anywhere at all, because all it is capable of is deconstruction and critique. The end result is nihilism, confusion and meaninglessness on a grand scale.

24

BS. 2R is moving just fine. There are a variety of “movers” here and I am one of them! Actually, all this back and forth involving your ideas is part of that movement. Among other things, it hammered into my brain in a fairly definitive way why serious engagement with the postmodern phase of social theorizing is a prerequisite for going beyond the postmodern phase. Otherwise, we just rehash old arguments that were generally put to bed decades ago.

Also, anyone who hangs any content at all on the Internet is going to get readers and respondents from all sorts of points of view. Being generally polite and engaging to all these different readers does not make one a “relativist”. It’s more the sign of someone schooled in customer service, who also has an interest the scaling phase of any innovation adoption curve. Meeting people where they are, generally speaking, is a life success formula, not a sign of intellectual weakness or lack of integrity.

25

Sigh. Just when I hoped we might be getting somewhere…

Some questions for you.

(1) Do you believe reality has a basic metaphysical (and physical) structure of some sort?

If not, then why not? How can that possibly be the case?
If yes, go to 2.

(2) Are human minds capable of discovering and understanding that structure?

If not, then why not? How can that possibly be the case?
If yes, go to 3.

(3) Reality has a structure and it is possible to know it. Great! Right? Do you agree that finding out that structure (science + metaphysics, which leads to epistemology), and basing a new cultural paradigm on THE TRUTH would be a good thing, and the best possible outcome for 2R? Or do you think it would be a disaster, because all the physicalists, idealists, panpsychists and postmodernists like yourself would have to rethink the foundations of the their worldview?

Additional question: What do you think Jason Storm would say?

AI analysis of the relationship between 2R and 2PC: "the defining ideological conflict of the post-postmodern era."
26

This:

"The mind constructs structure by acting as a prediction machine, using sensory data to build fluid mental models of the world. Instead of passively recording reality, the brain constantly generates top-down expectations, matching them against bottom-up information to organize, categorize, and make sense of our environment. The mind builds these internal frameworks through several core mechanisms:

  1. The Predictive Loop
    Perception is essentially “controlled hallucination”. The brain constantly predicts what it is about to experience (sight, sound, emotion). When reality matches the prediction, the information is integrated effortlessly. If there is a mismatch, the brain updates its model, constructing new structural rules to explain the anomaly.

  2. Neural Syntax and Binding
    Cognitive scientists have found that the brain maps abstract concepts—like “who did what to whom”—onto specific networks of neurons. It pulls together disparate sensory details (color, shape, movement) and “binds” them into a single, cohesive experience, like a rolling red ball, rather than separate visual fragments.

  3. Hierarchical Integration
    The mind is highly specialized but globally connected. Distinct local regions of the brain process specific, compartmentalized information (like sound or spatial awareness). These local processes are sent up to higher-level networks (like the prefrontal cortex), which integrate this data to form executive decisions, concepts, and abstract thoughts.

  4. Psychological Construction
    Rather than housing rigid, pre-programmed categories (like discrete emotion or memory boxes), the mind constructs psychological states as needed. It treats basic ingredients—past experiences, core bodily sensations, and cultural concepts—as “recipes” to construct our moment-to-moment realities.
    For a deeper look into the neuroscience of how the brain creates order from chaos, you can explore the Scientific American insights on perception or check out research from the National Institutes of Health on brain connectivity."

27

That isn’t metaphysics or cosmology. It has got nothing to do with the structure of reality, and is compatible with a wide range of underlying metaphysical claims. It’s neuroscience/psychology/COGS.

Metaphysics and cosmology sometimes overlap with theories of mind, but they are much more fundamental than that. They determine how people think about the nature of existence itself, not just how brains work.

An example might help: Physicalism + standard models of particle physics and cosmology.

This is a proposal for the struture of reality: metaphysical + physical. It’s an inadequate model, but it is a model of the structure of reality.

So question one is whether you think there is a structure (regardless of whether or not humans can know it).

28

Thank you Robert for this response, with which I broadly agree, especially re: your recognition that “being generally polite and engaging to all these different readers [and potential participants in the work of culturing a new Renaissance!] does not make one a relativist.”

I would also additionally note here for others, and to wrap up at least my contributions to this particular strand, that you and I have agreed to move forward to establish a subcircle on Collective Action grounded in a common commitment to forms of praxis and sense-making that facilitate collective action, and that do not assume “epistemic agreement” to be the necessary starting point of such a project.

So to Geoff, who appears to disagree with this principle, I would simply like to say respectfully in conclusion to this strand the following:

If you’re able to suspend your insistence that others must start out by agreeing with your epistemological argument and willing to commit to a more open praxis of sense-making, and are interested in joining with others (coming from different perspectives) in building a truly collaborative space for the discussion of collective action - which was the focus and purpose of my creation of this 2R Forum strand on May 11 - then you’re certainly welcome to join the new subcircle for that purpose when Robert and I initiate it.

But if you’re searching for a collaborative space focused or premised on agreement with your project and arguments, that would be a different kind of collaborative space, with a different purpose, which you’re obviously free to pursue as you wish in other ways.

To bring my contribution to this strand to a close, I would simply invite other members of this Forum interested in the topic of Collective Action to stay tuned for announcements from Robert and myself for initiating a live Collective Action subcircle discussion group in the near future.

(For anyone interested in an elaboration of some of the grounds for my take on an open sense-making approach to collective action work, I’ll attach below a kind of final P.S. to this strand.)

And CHEERS to all committed to the project of creating a new Renaissance to break out of the bottlenecks of modernity that have delivered us over to a trajectory of ecological collapse! If we don’t learn to ACT together in new ways, collapse is inevitable. But as Hannah Arendt repeatedly argued, the potential for beginning anew [natality] is basic to human existence, and therefore the “miraculous” or “magical” potential for initiating new trajectories is the human power that defies any certain inevitability.

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29

Original question: “Do you believe reality has a basic metaphysical (and physical) structure of some sort?”

My response describes why and how I believe anything at all. Namely, I model the universe beyond immediate perception through past experience and predictive guesswork generally consistent with past experiences. My past experience suggests some sort of coherent structure to the world. When action A leads to outcome B enough times with enough consistency, I tend to anticipate B, given A.

With the word “metaphysics” in the position of A, I anticipate the conversation is not likely heading in any direction I very interested in. To clarify, I’m keenly interested in Aristotle’s metaphysics. I’m also interested in the historical process by which the bulk of Western philosophy lost interest in Aristotle’s metaphysics. I’m also interested in refactoring selected elements of Aristotle’s metaphysics, if it sheds light on some current issue or another. As for metaphysics per se, I really don’t care much one way or the other. It seems like a lot of talk about nothing much in particular.

30

Postscript to this Strand

With due appreciation and thanks to Geoff for his thoughts and commitment to the importance of epistemic agreement, and because I agree that epistemic agreement is one core component of moving toward collective action, I’d like to elaborate here my reasons for arguing that epistemic agreement cannot be the starting point for the process of group sense-making that opens up the capacity for collective action. Coming to any form of epistemic agreement needed for collective action is actually a generative achievement of the sense-making process, not its starting point.

Any group that comes together with an interest in collective action will generally begin from various different perspectives. Far from being a problem, such differences are the very source of the generative creativity of any collective action project’s development. To insist that we allow into a group process working toward collective action only those folks who already agree on a particular epistemic framework negates the recognition that meaningful collective action toward building a commons begins with difference and requires a sense-making process to achieve epistemic agreement.

On my reading, postmodern philosophy’s value (at its best and most rigorously anti-relativist insistence, as exemplified by the work of Derrida) was to recognize differance as basic to the constitution of non-totalitarian human reality. And especially in our age of resurging totalitarian movements, its vital to emphasize that postmodern philosophy developed largely as a critical response to the forms of totalitarian/totalizing modes of thinking and political praxis that decimated much of the twentieth century, by closing politics and collective movements off from the play of differance. The legacy of the best postmodern thinking thus makes it possible for us to now move into forms of praxis (as the constitutive basis of a 2R) that, while accepting this aspect of the complex differential construction of human reality, does not end there. Instead, our new constitutive praxis moves into the necessary work of post-postmodern/meta- or trans-modern collaboration toward collective action, which requires us to figure out together exactly what is required to foster spaces of interbeing that allow the flows of differance to coordinate into islands of sufficient coherence (and epistemic agreement) to yield collective action benefits (some form of commons building).

This is, I would suggest, is the central challenge of any specific zone of activity truly dedicated to collective action. We accept and embrace differance, but also recognize that differance does not negate the possibilities of achieving coherence and epistemic agreement as part of the process of sense-making.

Therefore, in full agreement with Geoff’s emphasis on the need to move beyond all the dualities of modern thinking, as well as the relativism of some less rigorous (I would say “sloppy”) forms of postmodern thinking, it seems to me that only an interbeing approach to sense-making praxis, which sets up a supportive framework for humans to come together to co-constitute temporal coherencies (always singular and unique to the collective circumstances of the project) of epistemic agreement, can provide the way to breaking through the bottle-necks that block collective action.

For the philosophers among us, nothing is preventing any of us from coming together to constitute theoretical forms of epistemic agreement which help us to consolidate our understanding of principles we think are valuable for assisting with collective action in the present. But the urgencies of our metacrisis should make us deeply aware of the limitations of such projects pursued in abstraction from actual engagement in the collective praxis of commons building.

As for the character of the 2R Forum itself, I was attracted to it as a possible space for engaging a deeper conversation about collective action because of my experience of the disciplined and generative ways processes of sense-making were cultivated during the 2R Conference last fall. And from that experience, as Robert indicated, I would agree that this 2R forum is pretty clearly committed to welcoming differences in perspective as part of the richness of human diversity that we need to engage in order to make any second Renaissance possible.

The European Renaissance of the 1400s did not develop out of any epistemic agreement at its beginning, and in fact was actually inspired by the crashing together of vast strands of difference coming from amazingly diverse historical processes of development that included not only Greek philosophy, Arab-Muslim philosophy, Jewish Kabbalah and mysticism, the Christian tradition, and many different cultural strands within Europe. (Even within just France, for example, consider the diverse literary expressions of the Renaissance spirit manifest in Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Montaigne’s Essais!)

The historians of the modern era among us might even argue that the collapse of the magically open, creative, and all-too-brief early modern Renaissance occurred because of a rather violent and all-too quick channeling of the breadth and diversity of Renaissance humanism into a narrowed focus on the competition between a certain type of rationalist sense-making in opposition to a religious Reformation sense-making. This narrowing then set up the divisions and dualisms that would simultaneously animate and so tragically limit the potentials of Modernity, and thus ultimately precipitate our meta-crisis.

And even more radically, some of us who are familiar with medieval history could argue that what we call the Renaissance of the 1400s was already part of a great process of early modern European narrowing and restriction of views and cultural-political potential stemming from the violent appropriation of the riches of a previous Renaissance of the Middle Ages in Andalusia that had much more depth and breadth. This first Renaissance was constituted by the amazing flourishing of creative culture that developed within the three-way interflow/interbeing of Arab-Muslim, Jewish, and Christian thinkers, poets, and artists that occurred from c. 900-1100 C.E., before the violence of the Reconquista and the Crusades brought this first Renaissance to an end – an end that concluded with the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain that began in 1492, by which time the “new” (and already somewhat reduced, mainly Christian) Renaissance had already begun on the basis of the appropriation (and processes of dis-inheritance/ethnic cleansing that decimated this Andalusian culture) of all the riches inherited from the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Renaissance of the earlier Andalusian era.

(As a lighter sidenote, because of this history, perhaps we should be calling our attempt to create a contemporary Renaissance 3R rather than 2R! But even this can serve as a basic example of how, if we insist that agreement on some particular empirical claim or framework is a prerequisite for the beginning of strong collaborative work, we won’t get very far in our work toward a new ecological world, since we’ll greatly limit the creative field of potential collaborators in movement building.)

Like the first Renaissance, the origins of any truly generative 2R/3R will necessarily be grounded in the profound creativity of many different strands of thinking, religious yearning, culture, and political-ecological need coming together out of a common desire to find/create their way to a new future. This future will be enabled by collaborative spaces that facilitate processes of co-learning across difference to figure out what it takes to constitute forms of solidaristic sense-making that enable true collective action. Forms of collective action that are ultimately of planetary scope are necessary to achieve a future of mutual benefit and win-win collaboration within a framework of ecological partnership with the planet.

I would also suggest that this common aim and longing is already a very foundational agreement (whether we call it epistemic or not) that most people engaged with 2R do already share. That was certainly my impression from participating in the 2R Conference last fall.

Much more important for initiating any collaboration toward collective action is THIS kind of agreement in overall existential aim/commitment, rather than insistence on forms of “epistemic” agreement that can quickly get bogged down in the very kinds of scholastic debate over meaning that crippled the modern era.

Certainly modern historical experience (including of the revolutionary movement kind) has proven that such scholastic debates are generally not conducive to constituting effective paths toward inclusive and nonviolent collective action. (We could have an entire different debate over whether history has demonstrated to us that the attempt - especially in revolutionary or reform movements - to impose epistemic agreement as the basis for collective praxis often leads to the violence and tragic foreclosure of the positive potential of political movements, including the originary one of the Protestant Reformation.)

In sum, this is why I would suggest that philosophical-epistemic frameworks can inform, but cannot be assumed to provide the foundation or starting point for processes of collective action committed to a future of rebuilding the human/ecological commons.

I would suggest that a basic epistemic reality of any collaborative work in our existing world - dedicated to equitable commons building - must begin with the complex embrace of diversity that simultaneously rejects relativism and the associated nihilism of action that results from it. And it is in fact a common commitment to the PROCESS of sense-making as foundational praxis within a collective action frame that allows for such a complex but committed positioning.

To argue that any group/collective/community/forum committed to working toward collective action must begin with fundamental epistemic agreement appears to put the cart before the horse, since it is precisely the PROCESS of sense-making that constitutes the middle ground of interbeing, and which opens up the possibility for finding a common ground of epistemic agreement.

In brief, insisting on epistemic agreement as the starting point for collaborative work toward collective action, rather than as one of the key creations of sense-making through the process of interbeing facilitated by a collaborative space, imposes an insurmountable bottleneck at the very source of the collective action process.

This, in any case, is my P.S. overview and response to what I’ve learned from the engaging dialogue of this strand. Thank you to all who contributed, and I look forward to the opening up of our space for live sense-making re: the challenges of collective action in the near future. Robert and I will communicate that information when we’re ready to go.

Cheers,

31

Unless you are willing to accept the basic principles of what I am saying, then what you are trying to do cannot work. You cannot “break out of bottlenecks” while re-affirming the exact same bottlenecks. You cannot instigate collective action by re-affirming the conditions which prevent it. You cannot ground new collective meaning by embracing the postmodern thinking that destroyed it in the first place.

You are attempting to dress the old paradigm up in new clothes, and then claim this is progress towards real change. This might make you feel better, but it will achieve precisely nothing.

The real problem is that the paradigm change that 2R claims to be trying to facilitate requires that postmodernists and physicalists actually have to admit that (respectively) there is such a thing as truth, and that physicalism cannot coherently account for consciousness. Without a willingness to make those sort of changes compulsory, all you’re doing is pretending to change the world.

I would suggest that philosophical-epistemic frameworks can inform, but cannot be assumed to provide the foundation or starting point for processes of collective action committed to a future of rebuilding the human/ecological commons.

And I would suggest that you are tragically and catastrophically wrong. You are the epitome of the problem, claiming to be the solution.

32

The biggest obstacle to collective action is when those who do not realize that the map is not the territory insist that theirs is the correct map, and others must follow their lead. Conflicts throughout history have carried this general form, and you are perpetuating the same pattern in your interactions on this forum.

33

OK. In order to make sense of this comment we must accept a hidden assumption. That assumption is that there is no correct map. That all maps are wrong. It follows that there is no difference in value between an accurate map and a hopelessly inaccurate one, from which it follows that all maps are equal.

This is the foundational axiom of postmodernism: there is no truth apart from that there is no truth. Utterly self-refuting, and everything that follows from it is either worthless or harmful.

Again, pure postmodern thinking. “Previous attempts to claim maps were correct ended in conflict, therefore we must not accept any map as correct.”

You are prioritising politics over truth. This is what postmodernism has always done, and the result is total paralysis, directionlessness, and nihilism. And an awful lot of conflict (the “culture wars”, which the postmodernists have lost, but only after causing decades of damage to Western society).

You are repeating the mistakes of the postmodern past, and the whole thing is justified by the assumption that there is no correct map. And just to be clear, I am not talking about a perfect map. I am just talking about a map of the whole territory which has got the basic structure correct, with nothing of critical importance missing. No such map has ever existed, but your argument depends on an assumption that no such map is even possible.

Is that fair?

If so, please explain how justify this assumption. Did it follow a line of logical reasoning, starting with the available evidence? Or is it politics based on nothing?

34

Yes, this is fair. There is no correct map. All maps prove themselves to be wrong eventually, but some are useful provisionally. The Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao.

Here’s a formal proof (credit to Gemini):

Let us assume the challenger (you) is arguing the opposite: A map CAN perfectly equal the territory.

In logic, we can disprove this using a reductio ad absurdum (proving a premise false by showing that its logical conclusion leads to an impossibility or a contradiction).

1. The Setup (Definitions)

  • Let T be the Territory (a real-world object or system).

  • Let M be the Map of that territory.

  • For a map to truly be the territory (or perfectly represent it without loss), there must be a bi-directional, perfect isomorphism between them. Every single point, atom, and relationship in T must have a 1:1 corresponding point in M, with zero abstraction or omission.

2. The Spatial Contradiction (The Royce Paradox)

Suppose you are standing inside a territory (let’s say, England) and you want to draw this “perfect” 1:1 map M on the ground.

  1. Because the map M is perfect, it must map every single thing existing within the territory T.

  2. But the map M itself now exists inside the territory T.

  3. Therefore, to be a truly perfect map, M must contain a miniature map of itself (M_2) showing where it sits on the ground.

  4. But M_2 is now an object inside M, so it must contain an even smaller map of itself (M_3), which contains M_4, and so on, to infinity.

\\lim\_{n \\to \\infty} M_n

The Contradiction: To achieve a perfect 1:1 representation without omitting anything, the map requires an infinite regress of maps within maps. An infinite object cannot be contained within a finite territory. Therefore, a perfectly complete, non-abstracted map is physically and logically impossible.

Where does Gödel come into this?

You have excellent intuition here. While “the map is not the territory” belongs to semantics, Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem is the ultimate mathematical equivalent of this concept.

If we translate Gödel’s work into the language of maps and territories:

  • The Territory = Mathematical Truth (the underlying reality of numbers).

  • The Map = A Formal Axiomatic System (like arithmetic, using symbols and rules).

Gödel rigorously proved that the map can never cover the whole territory. He demonstrated that in any consistent formal mathematical “map,” there will always be true statements about numbers (territory) that the system’s rules can never prove or reach.

The Gödelian parallel: A system cannot map its own consistency from within itself. Just as a map cannot contain itself without exploding into infinity, a logical system cannot validate itself without stepping outside of its own framework.

Furthermore, to anticipate the counter-argument that you are ‘not talking about a perfect map, just one with nothing of critical importance missing’: this is where you move your own goalposts. The moment you introduce the word ‘critical,’ you are making a subjective human value judgment, not an objective statement about the territory. A road map intentionally leaves out topology; a geological map intentionally leaves out roads. Both are highly accurate, yet each completely omits what is ‘critically important’ to the other. Because a map must choose what data to throw away in order to be useful, it can never be the definitive, objective representation of the whole territory. The selection of what is ‘critical’ is an act of human interpretation—which is precisely why mistaking the map for the territory causes total gridlock when two groups with different ‘critical’ priorities clash.

35

Your post was generated by AI. Two can play at that game:

Your response systematically confuses three very different claims:

  1. “A map can be perfectly identical to the territory.”
  2. “A map can be useful and approximately accurate.”
  3. “There can exist a sufficiently accurate global framework.”

I never defended (1). I explicitly rejected it when I said I was not talking about a perfect map. The entire reductio therefore attacks a position I did not take.

The “map contains itself” argument is old and valid against total representational closure. A complete representation of reality cannot be finitely self-contained. Gödel, Tarski, Russell, Borges, Korzybski all point toward the same limitation: formal systems cannot completely ground themselves from within themselves.

But none of that implies relativism, postmodernism, or “all maps are equally invalid.” That conclusion simply does not follow. Gödel did not prove that arithmetic is useless. He proved that truth outruns formal closure. Arithmetic still maps numerical reality extraordinarily well. In fact Gödel’s theorem only works because there IS a stable correspondence between formal structure and mathematical truth in the first place. Likewise, the impossibility of a perfectly self-containing map does not imply the impossibility of increasingly accurate maps.

The reply equivocates between “no map can be complete” and “no map can be fundamentally correct.” Those are not remotely the same claim.

Newtonian gravity is not complete, but it is structurally correct within a large domain.
Evolutionary theory is not complete, but it is structurally correct.
Quantum mechanics is incomplete in interpretation, but spectacularly accurate operationally.

Human knowledge progresses precisely because some maps track reality better than others. If all maps were merely political constructions with no privileged relation to reality, then predictive success would be miraculous. Science would be impossible. Engineering would collapse. Aircraft would not fly more reliably under aerodynamics than astrology. The territory pushes back.

Reality constrains representation. That is the decisive anti-postmodern point.

Now to Gödel specifically.

Gödel demonstrates that sufficiently expressive formal systems cannot internally prove all truths about themselves. But this limitation only applies to systems attempting total self-grounding through syntax alone.

2PC explicitly avoids that trap. Why? Because in 2PC, formal structure is not ontologically ultimate. The Void exists precisely as the non-formalisable ontological ground from which formal systems emerge. The incompleteness problem arises when one tries to derive totality from inside a closed symbolic structure. Gödel proves that closure fails. But 2PC already agrees with this because the system is not closed. The Void is not another proposition inside the map but the condition for there being maps at all.

In standard formalism: system → attempts self-validation → incompleteness.

In 2PC: Void → enables embodiment of formal structure → local systems inherit incompleteness because they are derivative, not foundational.

So Gödel becomes not a refutation of truth, but evidence that truth transcends formal capture. That is almost the opposite of the postmodern interpretation.

You also claim that “critical importance” is merely subjective. Again, this overreaches badly. Some priorities are indeed perspective-dependent. But not all salience is arbitrary:

A map omitting tectonic fault lines is objectively bad for earthquake prediction.
A medical model omitting pathogens is objectively bad for infectious disease.
A cosmology omitting consciousness may turn out to be objectively incomplete if consciousness plays a constitutive role in collapse.

The fact that different maps serve different purposes does not imply there is no deeper integrated structure. It only implies finite agents use partial abstractions.

And importantly: abstraction itself presupposes structure in reality. You cannot abstract successfully from pure chaos. The very existence of predictive compression implies that the territory possesses stable regularities that maps can latch onto. That is why science works at all.

The deeper issue here is that your reply quietly substitutes: “humans cannot possess exhaustive omniscience” for “truth does not exist.”

But finite epistemology does not imply ontological relativism. 2PC’s position is:

  • no finite map can fully close over reality;
  • local maps are necessarily partial;
  • some maps are nevertheless objectively closer to the structure of reality than others;
  • coherence with the territory constrains survivability and predictive success;
  • Gödelian incompleteness reflects the impossibility of total formal self-grounding;
  • the Void functions as the non-formalisable ontological ground preventing complete closure.

So “the map is not the territory” is true, but it does not follow that maps are arbitrary, and nor does it follow that no globally coherent framework is possible.

A compass is not the North Pole. That does not mean north does not exist.

Or in the words of Jason Storm: there is such a thing as up.

36

Can you point out where I implied that maps are arbitrary?

You’re missing something. All maps are wrong, but it’s possible for some maps to be less wrong than others.

Continue accusing me of Postmodern mumbojumbo all you want - logic is not on your side. All maps being wrong simply does not imply that all maps are equal - this is unsound logic.

37

A common model for this is Using the Stages of Team Development | MIT Human Resources .

For example, the first week of the current research subcircle about 9-10 people arrived on the call. We explored a lot of different ideas about what 2R might really be about (forming). In the second week, attendance was down a bit, but many participants attended again. Same process continued. There were various attempts at getting the group to reframe 2R one way or the other. (Putative norming, but a bit premature …). Then, at the end of the second hour, one of the participants took an aggressive run at 2R founder @rufuspollock . I read that as a leadership challenge, needed to reestablish and/or confirm group structure and hierarchy (storming). After all the single combats get resolved that way, then we can settle down, agree on our “constitution”, and start producing whatever that agreement calls for producing. (norming, followed up by performing).

As facilitator, I strive to be very Sun Tzu about all this, avoiding battle as much as possible, but maneuvering quietly to end up on strategic high ground. There just is no skipping the “storming” step, however! It’s hard-wired into us. Groups that don’t get anywhere fall apart before they figure out who is who and what is what.

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38

Now an entirely human-generated reply.

You have just admitted that you do not believe an accurate map of the whole territory can even exist. It is important to clarify exactly what that means, in this context. The territory in this case is reality itself, and we must start with a reminder of what it means to say that no such map has ever existed. It’s crucial, because this is exactly how modernism and postmodernism must be understood in terms of Western history.

Before the modern age the map of the whole territory was dictated by the Catholic authorities, and anybody who disagreed was likely to end up dead. The Protestant Reformation was a rebellion against exactly that situation, but the real intellectual shift came with the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason (aka “the Enlightenment”). This rejected the authority of both the Pope and the Ancients, and introduced a new map which split reality into two realms: mind and matter. Both Galileo and Descartes made the same split, and science was assigned matter as its legitimate realm, while philosophy and religion were assigned everything else.

This led to great improvements in the way society worked, including the quality of our knowledge, but all attempts to produce a new map of the whole territory ended in failure. This project reached its intellectual high point in the work of Hume (who formally explained why such a map appeared to be impossible), and Kant, who tried to heroically rescue the situation by inventing Transcendental Idealism. This was a new map, which replaced the mind/matter dualism with phenomenal/noumenal, and claimed both science and humans in general cannot have knowledge of noumena. So this was a map of only the half of the territory which is least real, with the other half blanked out, containing only the message “Whatever be here is forever unknowable to humans.”

Kant is the most important philosopher of the modern age, because it was this conclusion which led to the bifurcation of philosophy into analytic and continental. Continental philosophy progressively got further and further away from making any claims about knowledge of noumena, and ultimately ended up at a dead-end known as postmodernism. Postmodernism is the ultimate embodiment of Humean-Kantian skepticism: an accurate map of the whole is impossible, because we cannot escape the veil of perception.

Analytic philosophy and science have taken a very different stance. They never fully accepted Kant’s conclusions, and have been searching for an accurate map of the whole territory ever since. Both have so far failed, and both have given up hope that the other will ever succeed. Most scientists think philosophy is irrelevant and have no idea what Kant said or where postmodern anti-realism came from. However, their attempts at a whole map of reality have never been able to find a coherent place for consciousness, and cannot integrate quantum mechanics (which they typically claim to be the “map of the very small”) and Relativity and cosmology (their map of the large). They can’t explain why they need two maps, and are utterly oblivious to the fact that the only thing which can connect their two maps is consciousness itself. They cannot work this out on their own, and analytic philosophy has failed to explain it either. Why has analytic philosophy failed? The answer is academic siloing and peer review, which makes it radical interdisciplinary work impossible. But the end result is that AP has not produced a coherent map of the whole, because it is still struggling with the same problems Kant didn’t solve.

Conclusion: No coherent map of the whole of reality has ever been produced.

Which leaves us with the same question: why should anybody accept the postmodern/Continental claim that no coherent map of the whole of reality is even possible? Why should we believe analytical philosophy and science, between them, cannot produce such a map?

This question could not be more important. It’s at the absolute core of my systematic criticism of Second Rennaissance as a movement: nobody here gives the slightest **** about finding that map, because everybody is still committed to the postmodern relativist claim that no such map is even possible. In doing so, 2R is completely missing what actually matters here, which is that materialistic science is in deep crisis precisely because it knows its maps are broken, and that the key to making a Second Rennaissance actually happen is to finally provide a coherent map of the whole of reality. But this is heresy here, because it contradicts the first and only commandment of postmodernism: there is no such thing as truth.

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Well done! Let me try a compressed version as a sort of lecture notes supplement.

  1. in the early-to-mid 20th century, there were competing totalizing views of the world. Hitler, Stalin, or the West. Pick one. But the “West” of the McCarthy era involved loyalty tests and a sense of triumphalism that would later lead to the Vietnam War debacle, among other things.

  2. As the post-WWII world decolonized, it turns out there are billions of people who chose “none of the above” It turns out there are many cultures, religions, and sensibilities on the planet, not all of which are easily folded into grand narratives about a master race, dictatorship of the proletariat, or infinite material progress under a democracy that in practice was very selectively applied.

  3. Postmodernism appeared to explain the fracturing of the metanarratives. It certainly did not cause them! Hitler lost the war on his own. Stalinism rotted from the inside. As for the US - the US metanarrative of being a City on Hill and a shining example for the world fell apart performatively when educated, elite youth preferred draft deferments over bombing Hanoi. Postmodernism has been the default cultural setting in the US ever since. “Do your own thing” is about as close to a credal statement as the US gets lately.

  4. There are of course consequences when nations lose their collective focus. Anyone paying attention in 2025-26 can see exactly what those consequences are. Can we do better? One hopes so!

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I don’t know what else to say, Robert. You are now very openly and passionately defending postmodernism. Though to be fair, you have consistently done so, throughout my interactions with you here, and so has pretty much everybody else.

As a group, you are in collective denial in a very serious way. You claim to be at the cutting edge of a new way of thinking called “Metamodernism”, which “pushes through” and finally leaves postmodernism behind. I see absolutely zero evidence to suggest that anybody here, apart from me, is actually defending a metamodern position, as defined by Jason Storm. You aren’t even trying to defend it or pretending to defend it. You are very explicitly and unashamedly defending unreformed postmodernism.

I am the only genuine post-postmodernist here.

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@geoff, until you study the authors listed below, please refrain from using the term “postmodern”. You very evidently have no idea what you are talking about!

While the thinkers grouped under the banner of “postmodernism” frequently rejected the label—often preferring terms like post-structuralist, pragmatist, or deconstructionist—their collective work fundamentally dismantled Western assumptions about universal truth, objective reality, stable language, and progress.

If you want to understand the foundational architecture of postmodern theory, these 10 figures are entirely essential.

1. Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998)

Lyotard is the man who gave the movement its defining catchphrase. Commissioned to write a report on knowledge in the digital age, he defined the postmodern condition as an “incredulity toward metanarratives.” He argued that grand, totalizing stories designed to legitimize truth and progress (such as Marxism, the Enlightenment, and scientific triumphalism) have collapsed, leaving us with a fragmented landscape of localized, competing “language-games.”

  • Core Concept: Metanarratives, Language-games, The Differend

  • Essential Text: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979 )

2. Michel Foucault (1926–198 4)

Foucault shifted the focus of theory toward the structural architecture of social control. Using an “archaeological” and “genealogical” approach, he demonstrated that what society deems “objective truth” or “human nature” changes radically across historical epochs. For Foucault, knowledge and power are inseparable (power-knowledge); institutions like prisons, clinics, and schools do not just manage citizens—they actively construct what we define as “sane,” “criminal,” or “norma l.”

  • Core Concept: Power-Knowledge, Biopolitics, The Panopticon, Episteme

  • Essential Text: Discipline and Punish (1975) or The History of Sexuality (1 976)

3. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)

The father of deconstruction, Derrida targeted the Western philosophical tradition’s “logocentrism”—the belief that language can perfectly mirror a stable, present reality. He argued that language is a self-referential system where meaning is never static or fully present; instead, it is constantly deferred and dependent on a web of contrasting differe nces.

  • Core Concept: Deconstruction, Différance, Logocentrism

  • Essential Text: Of Grammatology (1967)

4. Jean Baudrillard (1929 --2007)

Baudrillard offered a dark, brilliant critique of mass media, consumer culture, and technological specialization. He famously declared that we no longer interact with reality, but rather with a simulacrum—a copy with no original. In our media-saturated world, the map has replaced the territory, generating a state of hyperreality where simulation becomes more real than the real itself.

  • Core Concept: Simulacra and Simulation, Hyperreality, Sig n-value

  • Essential Text: Simulacra and Simulatio n (1981)

5. Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) & Félix Guattari (1 930–1992)

Writing as an inseparable collaborative duo, the philosopher Deleuze and the radical psychoanalyst Guattari launched an assault on the rigid, centralized structures of Western thought. Rejecting the linear, hierarchical “arborescent” (tree-like) structures of knowledge, they championed the rhizome—a map of non-linear, decentered, and endlessly multiplying connections that echoes complex adaptive systems.

  • Core Concept: Rhizome, Schizoanalysis, Deterritorialization

  • Essential Text: Anti-Oedipus (1972) or A Thousand Plateaus (1980)

6. Fredric Jameson (b. 1934)

Jameson provided the definitive Marxist structural analysis of the movement. Rather than viewing postmodernism merely as an aesthetic choice or philosophical whim, he diagnosed it as the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” He tracked how the global marketplace commodifies everything—including art, history, and human depth—resulting in a fragmented culture dominated by pastiche, surface-level sheen, and a schizophrenic experience of time.

  • Core Concept: Late Capitalism, Pastiche, Cognitive Mapping

  • Essential Text: Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

7. Richard Rorty (1931–2007)

Representing the American pragmatist branch of postmodern thought, Rorty sought to bust the myth of philosophy as a “mirror of nature.” He argued that human language does not reflect an external reality; it is simply a tool we use to cope with the world. He advocated for replacing the search for absolute, universal truth with an ongoing, democratic, and edifying conversation.

  • Core Concept: Anti-foundationalism, Ironism, Contingency

  • Essential Text: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) or Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989)

8. Judith Butler (b. 1956)

Building directly upon Foucault’s theories of discourse and power, Butler revolutionized feminist theory and gender studies. They argued that gender is not an innate biological essence or a stable internal identity, but rather a performativity—an identity instituted through a stylized, stylized repetition of socially scripted phys ical acts.

  • Core Concept: Gender Performativity, Subversion, Discursive C onstruction

  • Essential Text: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

9. Roland Barthes (1915–1980)

Transitioning from structuralism to post-structuralism, Barthes fundamentally altered literary theory with his famous proclamation of “the death of the author.” He argued that a text’s meaning does not belong to the person who wrote it, nor is there a single “secret” meaning to unlock; instead, a text is a tissue of citations, and its true synthesis occurs entirely in the mind of the reader.

  • Core Concept: The Death of the Author, The Writerly Text , Mythologies

  • Essential Text: Image-Music-Text (1977, featuring the 1967 essay)

10. Zygmunt Baum an (1925–2017)

The prominent sociologist captured the sociological and existential reality of late-20th-century life through his concept of “liquid modernity.” Bauman argued that the solid, predictable structures of early modernity (stable careers, long-term state institutions, rigid communities) have melted away into a fluid, hyper-flexible, and precarious world driven by consumerism, immediate gratification, and systemic uncertainty.

  • Core Concept: Liquid Modernity, Liquid Love, Consumerist Precarity

  • Essential Text: Liquid Modernity (2000)

The Theoretical Matrix

Core Philosophical Focus Primary Thinkers Central Objective
Epistemology & Truth Lyotard, Rorty Destabilize “universal truths” and grand narratives.
Language & Textuality Derrida, Barthes Reveal the instability of meaning and shift authority to the reader/system.
Power & Identity Foucault, Butler Expose how institutions and discourses construct human subjects.
Media & Economics Baudrillard, Jameson, Bauman Analyze how late-capitalism and mass simulation alter human perception.

Are you interested in how these thinkers transitioned away from the rigid structures of early 20th-century structuralism, or are you looking to trace how these ideas evolved into contemporary frameworks like metamodernism?